The most dangerous virus is runaway government spending

When I came to Washington, D.C., in 1985, Ronald Reagan was president. I was working for the Reagan budget office. We did something we weren’t very proud of at the time. We introduced the first $1 trillion budget in American history, which was unthinkable. One trillion dollars. There are 12 zeroes in a trillion. A trillion is a million dollars times a million. The budget deficit hit $200 billion and 6% of our entire GDP. Again, unthinkable.

Now, fast forward 37 years. The budget today is nowhere close to $1 trillion. In 2021, President Joe Biden’s first year in office, the federal spending came in at just under $7 trillion ($6.81 trillion, to be exact). So, in less than four decades, the budget has grown sevenfold. Much faster than inflation. Much faster than the economy. The government is now gobbling up the economy, spending up to 30% of our national output. Add state and local spending, and we are close to 40%.

We have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on unemployment insurance programs with no quality controls, so more than $100 billion was doled out to fraudulent claims. Billions of dollars went to criminals living in Nigeria, South Africa and Mexico. That’s some stimulus to the economy. The Wall Street Journal found that we spent tens of billions of dollars on the New York subway system even though ridership is down by two-thirds. We could practically be giving every rider a free limousine service, which would be cheaper for taxpayers. According to the Wall Street Journal, more money has gone to the New York subway system than all of the federal money for COVID-19 treatments.

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